Customer-first marketing: Align marketing content with real customer problems

In the last blog we mentioned customer journey mapping and how this is a useful approach to helping you to understand the customer experience and pain points. In today’s blog post we are going to explore how mapping customer journeys can be a catalyst for aligning marketing content with real customer problems.

Using your customer journeys to identify their content needs

As a reminder a customer journey is the steps a customer takes when interacting with your organisation, from initial awareness to becoming a loyal customer. It is about putting yourself in your customer shoes and leading with their journey rather than your organisations and encompasses all of the interactions, both indirect and direct of your organisation.

This insight enables you to understand where you are losing customers or at risk of losing customers and need to focus your attention. But also provides invaluable insight into your customers behaviour, needs and motivations. You can use this insight to strengthen your marketing content by focusing on what really matters to your customers.

For example, if you are working with a brand where you know a moment of truth (a make-or-break moment that could make them walk away from your brand) is around renewals. Then develop content that is focused on the benefits of renewals, how easy it is to renew and what they need to do. Making it a balance of informational and persuasion-based content.

Also make sure this content is optimised for different types of search, traditional organic search, AI overviews, voice search and social search (TikTok or Instagram), so you can meet your customers where they are naturally looking for answers.

Shift from selling features to selling outcomes

Having a deeper understanding off customer needs can help your marketing team to shift from focusing on selling features to solving problems your customer face. For example, we’ve worked with several brands selling courses or education-based solutions over the years. You’re not selling the content of the course, but the outcome the individual wants. To people who want to do a leadership course you are more likely to be selling confidence than the subject matter. Understanding the emotional need your customer is trying to solve can help you to create higher impact marketing content.

This is something that you see gyms do really well. Gyms are great at selling the outcome you want to be fitter, stronger, healthier. You never see them focus on the equipment they have. But they also use a lot of human-centred storytelling, they will work with influencers, share success stories and this works because consumers are craving authenticity. They often also are trying to encourage people to share user generated content on certain themes.

In our next blog we will be covering the topic of customer-centric KPIs.